Spotlight: Aging - Brain Adapts to Wear -- How to Harness Ability to Keep Up?

Oct 17, 08:52 AM

Current Headlines: WASHINGTON - When aging hampers memory, some people's brains compensate to stay sharp. Now scientists want to know how those brains make do - in hopes of developing treatments to help everyone else keep up.

Details

Losing a step: This is not Alzheimer's disease, but the wear-and- tear of so-called normal aging. New research is making clear that memory and other brain functions decline to varying degrees even in otherwise healthy people as they age, as anyone who habitually loses car keys has probably suspected.

The question: How to gird our brains against time's ravages, a question becoming critical as the population grays. If you're 65 today, odds are you'll live to 83. But improving health care means people in their 50s today may live another 40 years.

Critical: "I don't think we've recognized, as scientists or a society, (that) this is the front-and-center public health issue we face as a nation," Dr. Denise Park, director of the University of Illinois' Center for Healthy Minds, told fellow brain specialists assembled by the government last week.

"We need to understand how to defer normal cognitive aging ... the way we've invested in fighting heart disease and cancer."

What's next?

Making do: There are intriguing clues, gleaned from discoveries that some seniors' brains literally work around aging's damage, forging new pathways when old ones disintegrate.

Realistic: "It's not just fanciful or pie-in-the-sky" to try harnessing that ability, said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, which organized last week's meeting to seek advice on the most promising research.

High on the list: Simple physical exercise. It seems to do the brain as much good as the body.

Understanding

Distinction: What's normal aging and what signals impending Alzheimer's? Science can't yet tell for sure, but there seem to be distinct differences.

Consider: A healthy brain is a bushy one. Branch-like tentacles extend from the ends of the brain's cells, enabling them to communicate with each other. The more you learn, the more those connections form.

Alzheimer's kills neurons, so the cells disappear along with connections their neighbors need.

With normal aging, the cells don't die, but their bushes can shrivel to skinny twigs . Cells that are less connected have a harder time sending messages. You may know someone's name, but not be able to recall it.

Fighting back:

Some brains withstand a lot of assault before showing symptoms, something called "cognitive reserve."

Compensation is how the brain adapts when old pathways quit functioning, to reroute itself and use alternates.

Originally published by Associated Press .

(c) 2007 Commercial Appeal, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.